Getting to God: How do we get there when we don’t believe?

The young woman watched us from a nearby table, a mixture of fascination and skepticism in her expression as she pretended to read a book. We were in the spacious dining hall at the Ananda retreat outside of Nevada City, California. Dusk settled over the meadow outside the windows. The evening meal had ended and a few small groups of people lingered at the tables to talk. But the young woman sat alone, watching and listening. I went over to see if she wanted to join us.

No, I’m fine, she said, but she didn’t seem fine—certainly not content. I had seen her over the past few days we had been at the retreat, and she was always alone, watching at the edge of other gatherings, like a child who wants to play but doesn’t want the other children to know she wants to join in, uncomfortable in her aloneness but trying to say to others, I’m fine. I don’t need you.
We chatted for a few minutes, and I turned to leave when she blurted out, “How do you get there?” Her face flushed as she said these words. “I mean, you guys all seem so… happy, and I know it’s about this, this God-thing, but I don’t believe in God, so how do you get there… when you don’t believe in God?”

Having come from the same perspective years ago—that of a seeking skeptic who sensed there was more to existence than the materialists were telling us, but still unable to accept all that God stuff—I felt that I could share my perspective with her without “preaching.” I sat back down and we talked, and I told her what I will tell you, and perhaps it will help if you are one of us—and we are many—who know that to have a rich spiritual life should not require that we accept untenable church dogmas or suppress our intelligence and our common sense.

First, I told her, don’t believe. Belief is unnecessary. If you force yourself to believe something that another part of you (whether intellect or intuition) already rejects at some level, you are avoiding an issue that will inevitably surface. And often the surfacing of the doubt comes at a bad time. Worse case scenario: you silence your doubts, give away all your possessions and join a monastery, only to find six weeks/months/years later that your doubts are so strong that you cannot continue on your present course.

Usually, it’s less dramatic than this; you go to a weekend “spiritual” retreat somewhere or find a local church or temple and start attending their programs, but you gradually lose interest, often because you cannot accept some aspect of the groups’ teachings. Or because of those annoying spiritual people. Or they use the G-word (God) too much. Or… fill in the blank; it’s always something, isn’t it?

No, belief is not necessary. But practice is necessary. By that I mean spiritual practices that have stood the test of time and that have come from true spiritual paths and their teachers. Here at Ananda, these are common practices based on Yogic teachings that are thousands of years old. The practices are not “owned” by Ananda or any other group, church or person; Ananda simply offers an expression of the ancient teachings and practices to make them relevant to our varied natures and the culture and times in which we live.

Why is spiritual practice so important? Because the goal of religion is—or at least is meant to be—the direct, spiritual experience of a higher reality, your higher Self. Call it inner communion with God if you want (or don’t, as the terms are only there for our mental convenience). Whatever the terminology, understand that this experience is a change—an expansion—of our consciousness, and you cannot get there without doing something here to change your consciousness anymore than you get to the top of a mountain without taking that first step up the trail.

All movement, all growth, requires that we put out energy in a specific direction. That’s what spiritual practices do: they raise and direct our energy, but with the focus on directing that energy not outward, but inward and upward to the higher energy centers of awareness within us. The foundational practice in Yogic teachings and a key practice in every world religion and spiritual path (in some form, even if it has been suppressed or diluted over time) is the practice of meditation .

To practice meditation does not require that you believe anything. As Swami Kriyananda, the founder of Ananda writes, “Belief is hypothesis; faith, on the other hand, is born of experience.” Meditation is the spiritual practice that leads one—when practiced correctly, and consistently—to direct experience of spiritual truth.
And why would we settle for anything less than direct, personal experience before accepting something as true? If “religion” and “God” have not made sense to us in the past, it’s because we have been looking at dogmas and definitions that often have no meaning for us. In fact, many of them, as belief systems and activities, contradict our reason and our personal experience.

So, to get to God, we must remove the stumbling block of thinking that these untenable beliefs—especially antiquated definitions of God—are a viable path for us. Instead, we can take up a spiritual practice such as mediation so that we can rely not on belief but on our actual experience. We can’t have this experience, however, simply by sitting in a church, reading a book or waiting passively for spiritual realization to drop into our consciousness. We must embark on the Great Adventure of following a spiritual path, of taking up spiritual practices such as meditation.

The good news is that meditation is easy to learn and enjoyable to practice—and you don’t even need to run off to a Himalayan cave to practice it. I learned how to meditate from teachers at Ananda here in Sacramento, and the practice allowed me to transition from a seeking skeptic (I vacillated between atheism and agnosticism, but just knew there was “something more”) to someone with a spiritual life that gives me great joy and meaning. And I didn’t have to renounce the world or compromise my intellect.

That’s what I told the young woman at Ananda’s retreat years ago: don’t believe, but try the practice of meditation and see for yourself. Is meditation the only spiritual practice available to us? Of course not, and your temperament may incline you to first look into Yogic philosophy (that’s me), selfless service, or devotional chanting, just to name a few options. There are many paths. But if you don’t try them, they are useless to you. Don’t mistake knowing about a practice with doing a practice.

Where do you start? You can come to Ananda and take a class series in meditation. Or just contact Ananda for other resources and more information. Whatever you do, do something. A year from now, do you want to still be pondering the flaws of traditional religion while wishing there was some way to experience that “something more” that you sense is beyond the veils of dogmatic teachings? Or, do you want to be on the spiritual path and actually knowing, through your own experience, that within you, in the silence, there is joy and a divine presence that surpasses understanding but is within reach of your experience?

Questions or comments about this article? Email the Ananda Center
This is the first in a series of web articles that will focus on “Getting to God” for us skeptics, thinkers and other seekers who want to have a spiritual life without compromising our intellect, intuition, or independence. Check back around the first of each month for the next web article in this series.